I kept thinking four stars, but as I reached the end, I exclaimed "Wow" and simply sat there, just as I had with THE SEA, THE SEA. I am once again left in a state of awe. How does she, Iris Murdoch, achieve this? How does she write with such depth that I was completely unaware of reaching that profound level?

In an “Elegy for Iris”, her husband John Bayley describes his admiration for ‘Iris’s marvelous perception of what some people hunger for and how, consequently, they behave.’

Her ability to write from the depths of that hunger is truly remarkable. “Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.” - The Abbess

“As a landscape painter, Miss Murdoch is superb.” - John Updike. She endows the lake, the woods, the sky, as well as inanimate objects like houses, jets flying overhead, and bells with a sense of character. “Only the windows seemed to Dora a little dark and blank, like the eyes of one who will soon be dead.” This is a powerful statement within the context.

As I closed this book, I craved more, just as I did after reading THE SEA, THE SEA and THE BLACK PRINCE. No more mediocrity and superficiality... I seek meaning and depth, with the occasional escape provided by authors like Carl Hiassen in south Florida or Elin Hilderbrand on the beach.

Once again, I am grateful for Boxall’s 1001.

Her fourth novel, written in 1958, was much applauded in the canon of English novels. In fact, one might say that it made her name as a writer, and after it, she never looked back. Over time, it has come to be seen as one of her most approachable novels.

This is a very well-written book. Everything is in the right place. It is crisp, and the characters are all carefully delineated. It's as if she knows what is going to happen right from the start and sets everything out to allow her to make the statements she wants to make in the latter part of the novel, hammering home her themes at the end.

But like most of her work, it is incredibly middle class. Everyone is middle class or aspires to be middle class, except for the bumbling rustics and wrinkled retainers, of which there are a few but not enough to matter or be developed enough to be of any significance within the novel. The novel begins a bit like some erstwhile Mills & Boon tedious romantic tragi-comedy, develops into Brian Rix-like farce, only to lead into tragedy. For once here, farce precedes tragedy.

Did I say it was dated? It might be very well-written, but it hasn't travelled very well from the late 50's. Reading it, you have to bear in mind the political and social climate of when it was written to gain some perspective. It's a bit like driving a 50's Rolls Royce. Perfect in so many ways, everything is there and it all works well, but it all just seems sort of out-of-date and somewhat jaded now. The decriminalisation of homosexuality between two consenting adults did not take place till the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. As such, Michael's closet latent homosexuality would have been a major issue at the time the novel is set, rather than it would appear for a reader now. That Murdoch chose that role to play out within the novel shows that she felt strongly on this issue, and gay themes were to play a part in many of her subsequent novels.

Not that homosexuality is a dominant theme in The Bell. It's just one of the many moral dilemmas that Murdoch sets up. These occur all the way through the book. It is as if we are presented with a series of moral dichotomies and dualisms set out one after another. Even some of the characters seem to be set up as the opposites of each other to make moral points. But this is the morality of post-Second World War Britain, coming out of rationing as it did in 1954, a gradual awakening of the populace (in this case, of course, the middle class populace) to the possibility of freedom and personal liberation, and therefore, of choice and possibilities.

The two chief characters are Dora, who is made out to be a completely impulsive airhead who is sexually promiscuous (to a degree) but married to a bully of an academic type (Paul) who she is to a degree in awe of, but she cannot make up her mind whether to leave him for good or to stay and make the best of it, subsuming her character to his will. The other chief character is Michael, the closet gay, when to be gay was NOT to be out, and who has had a chequered career in teaching. He is also the owner of Imber Court, which is home to the lay community attached to the closed-order convent.

I am not going to run you through a what-happens-next write-up. You can find that everywhere. What is important, however, is that a seemingly 'light read' novel can contain such well-crafted set-ups in morality. Is Dora Iris? Is she under-writing herself? If so, why did she make her such an airhead? And what is the purpose of replacing the new bell with the old - a highly impractical and thoroughly unbelievable set of events that is the sabotage by sawing through the legs of the pontoon bridge (at night, underwater, without anyone noticing - just like the hauling of the old bell from the lake, with a tractor no less!!!!). I thought as I read the book that Murdoch was being utterly derisive of religion in casting the lay community as such a bunch of bumbling middle-class mealie-mouthed hypocrites. But really, she is just setting up more morality dichotomies for us to make choices between. Behind their po-faced religiousity, the lay community are all just as mundane, petty-ridden as the worst bourgeois atheist. Nick's revelation / sermon towards the end of the book is used as a discourse on the essential hypocrisy of the community, and forces us to assess all the hypocrisies that have been carefully laid out within the novel up to that point, before the final tragedy that shatters the whole scenario and makes the characters reassess themselves for the better.

This is a very good book on moral dilemma. It's a pity that it hasn't aged as well as it might, but as long as you bear in mind when it was written, you can get the best out of it. From Mills & Boon, to farce to tragedy to morality play - it's all there written in this careful clipped Oxfordian prose like a long story from a 60s Women's Own magazine. Yet a thousand times better. The final 30 pages make you understand the farce and tragedy played out in the preceding 290 pages. A very worthwhile read but not something to be read and read again. Far too middle class!

Iris Murdoch is a very particular writer for me as she is able to produce writing that is loaded with erudition and yet is immensely accessible.

She presents an enormous density in elaborate sentence constructions that function as beautiful descriptions of action and thought that never tire. On the other hand, she manages to do all this while maintaining an extremely intense plotline, with a succession of events that capture our interest and lead us to question what will happen next, while we delight in the interiors of each character.

The "Bell" is not very far from "The Sea, the Sea". We have a small community of people, each with their own particularities, but united by the same desire to find themselves, to understand what they can still do with their lives to make them feel better about themselves and with others. There is spirituality in the midst, with a neighboring convent, but the center is really the country house to which they withdraw in the eagerness to, through the distancing from the ordinary reality full of pleasures and sins, find the transcendence that allows them to redeem all that was left behind.

The "Bell", although here nicknamed Gabriel (the messenger angel of God), ends up not delivering the messages that everyone expects, creating an anti-climactic conclusion, but at the same time a realistic one, because according to the results of these retreats that so many of us cherish and spend time imagining that they could do miracles for us, inside. Remember "Walden" (1854) by Thoreau, a hymn to escape and retreat, which ends up laying bare how everything is just a mere luxury invented by the bourgeoisie, a farce in the guise of confronting the established rules for living in society.

But what I take away from this reading is much more the world created, the human density populated by the interior of each character, their relationships, rejections, longings and fears. Murdoch beautifully weaves what she has to tell and transports us to the universe she has created, making us feel good in her world.

Published in VI: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

I love Iris Murdoch with a passion. Her novels have become a source of anticipation for me, as I expect certain elements that always manage to captivate. There's that one astonishing and humorous transition, like the one that occurs early on a train in this particular work. And there are at least two abrupt sexually-centered plot twists that have me exclaiming out loud on the subway. Additionally, her novels are filled with a few incredible lines that border on philosophy, making me stop and ponder. Most importantly, there's a sense in her novels that anything is possible. As the excellent A.S. Byatt interview puts it, she has the instincts of the 19th century novelist, yet she is thoroughly contemporary.

However, I must issue a caution. If you are interested in this book, do not read the back jacket or any other information. The first surprise in the book is truly wonderful, as it was for me when I least expected it.

I didn't love "THE BELL" as much as "THE SEA, THE SEA" or "A SEVERED HEAD". It feels as if Murdoch is still shaking off some structural ghosts from more conventional fiction. This was her 4th novel, and the set-up is great, very reminiscent of "Black Narcissus". A lay-community has set up camp in a mansion and founded a spiritual community outside the gates of an old Abbey, which is waiting for a giant bell. In her eagerness to people the community, Murdoch's generosity with supporting characters sometimes left me a bit confused, especially with all the boring male names. The complexity of the set-up and the slightly wrapped-up, mid-century feeling of the ending also slowed me down.

Nevertheless, the three perspective characters - Dora, a flighty aspiring painter with a harsh husband; Michael, the leader of the community with a secret past; and Toby, a teenager of boundless energy - carry this book. Murdoch uses various bells, both metaphorical and actual, to great effect. There's a spectacular sequence with birds, and the nuns, sitting invisible on the grounds, add a unique tension to the action.

Once this book gets going, and it turns Murdochian, I was thrilled. There is an incredible revelation from the headlights of a car - a device she reuses almost identically in "THE SEA, THE SEA" - and things proceed from there with a relentless sexual logic that I adored. And the writing! Just look at these lines: "Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into the opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection." And "Memories of the previous evening returned to him vividly, and he had a curious sense of being unfaithful, followed by a feeling of the utter messiness of everything. Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself."
If you're interested in Murdoch, I'd recommend starting with "A SEVERED HEAD" so you can build trust in her capacity for insanity. I might have put this book down after 40 pages if I didn't have faith in her, but I'm very glad that I didn't.

Good and bad things are inextricably smooshed together in Iris Murdoch’s hoity toity novel.

For a start, don’t look for any characters that don’t go to Oxford or don’t live in London, unless it’s a gardener. We are in the land of posh. But then, you can’t really dislike a 1958 novel that has such a sympathetic presentation of a gay man who keeps falling for (very) inappropriately young boys.

On the other hand, it’s kind of aggravating that everything, like I mean EVERYTHING in this novel, is symbolic. Obv THE BELL is (both of them); the dog is; the swimming nun is; the weather is; the butterfly the lady rescued in the train compartment is; the lake is; the big country house is. There is nothing in an Iris Murdoch novel that doesn’t symbolise something else, something really chinscratchingly abstract probably. It’s kind of exhausting, your brain at some point will go yeah yeah, okay okay.

People say oh Iris Murdoch wrote philosophical novels. Well, occasionally the action stops and the characters start to mull. This is what I mean. Some guy is spouting on page 131: “Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality – when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection?...” And blah blah blah. I guess it’s philosophy, but it sounded like profound white noise to me a lot of the time.

It's like she writes serious farces; the plot is full of wacky unlooked-for things happening that might be thought of as funny, but no, wipe that smile off, Iris is going to muse upon them for a page and find some jawbreakers in them.

There is a dour scholar who has a flighty young wife. I don’t know if Iris was trying to make him a comedy character but he is inclined to say stuff like “Your escapades have diminished you permanently in my eyes.” And later “Don’t paw me. I’m not sexually attracted to you at this moment. I sometimes wonder if I ever will be again.” When his wife Dora apologises for whatever it was she’d done wrong (being alive probably) he says “How absolutely not enough that is!” Hilarious!

There are also some typical carefree moments from the 1950s. For example, “It was foolish of him to have had that second pint of strong cider; he was so unused to the stuff now, it had made him quite tipsy. But he knew he would be all right once he got into the van; the driving would sober him up.” (And the driving does sober him up!) And “Toby [he is 18 by the way] was not in the habit of sitting and brooding. Usually he was active, practical, and without a care in the world. With the simplicity which goes with a certain sort of excellent up-bringing* he had regarded himself as not yet grown up. Men had never troubled him nor women neither. “Falling in love” he regarded as something reserved for the future.” (*i.e. English upper middle class)

And yet, I kind of liked this. The whole thing of an atheist writing about sincerely religious people was very good, most of the characters weren’t made of cardboard, it kept me reading all the way to the end but would I recommend it to you lovely GR people? Not really.

A small community beside a monastery where those people land who seek tranquility and flee a little (not completely) from the rhythm and established patterns of daily life. A calm that will be shaken with the arrival of Dora, one of the protagonists of this story, and the appearance of a new bell destined for the convent that triggers a series of events that will test some deep themes such as the faith of the community's inhabitants and their personal transformation.

Murdoch presents us with a text in which, after an initial part focused on character construction rather than plot, it takes on an almost frenetic rhythm that, as a reader, generates in you the incessant desire to know where the story will go. The action never, in any case, drowns out the moral and sexual issues in an eminently religious community. The Irish writer introduces into the narration themes such as symbolism, a certain philosophical reflection, and the psychological introspection of each of the characters, elements that reinforce the central conflict of the work: the struggle between desire and morality, freedom, repression, and love and friendship, without leaving aside repressed homosexuality or religious hypocrisy.

I discovered Murdoch with this work, and now I feel the need to continue reading it, especially because I am enthusiastic about these writers who expose us to addictive stories combined with moral, existential, etc. reflections. Therefore, it is a highly recommended work to a wide range of readers.

My first encounter with Iris Murdoch's work was truly remarkable, and I'm certain it won't be my last.

She has crafted a gorgeously written novel that held me captive, compelling me to turn the pages at breakneck speed.

The story revolves around a bell, as well as the nuns and workers at Imber Abbey, which is located outside of London.

It is a tale that is simultaneously funny, poignant, and sad, all told through the most beautiful words.

I'm so glad that I finally took the time to read this masterpiece.

It has left an indelible mark on my literary journey, and I look forward to exploring more of Murdoch's works in the future.

4.5 ⭐️

What motivates our behavior? To what extent are our decisions under rationale control? These questions have been continuously discussed, at least since Freud. (Of course, even the Biblical Paul knew the problem—see Romans 7:15).

Iris Murdoch’s The Bell seems to suggest that we are never entirely in control, at least not in a deliberate way. We are highly subject to impulse and whim, which leaves both us and others mystified by our actual actions.

Early in the novel, Dora is on her way to join her husband in a lay religious community near the Abbey at Imber. Seated in a crowded train, she notices an older woman standing in the aisle. She contemplates whether to give up her seat and weighs the pros and cons in her mind. Then, she decides not to give up her seat. However, immediately after, she gets up and offers the seat to the standing lady.

The decision is made, but Dora acts otherwise. Although no real consequence follows from Dora’s impulse, it预示着 similar acts of unpremeditated impulse that will recur throughout the novel, some with devastating consequences.

It seems to me that part of the issue Murdoch takes up in The Bell is that we have become unmoored from a religious or ritual context that determines decisions and gives them weight, or at least imposes swift judgment on those who violate “the correct norms.” Michael, who has homosexual tendencies and is attempting to submerge them within a somewhat mystical religious devotion, provides perhaps the most interesting and, in some sense, tragic case in this novel of the dilemma between cautiously motivated behavior and sudden impulse. And other characters who gather in the Imber religious community are also caught in their own mysteries of desire and decision.

I found this novel highly interesting and profoundly stimulating. More Murdoch ahead!

This book didn't work for me, unfortunately.

I truly wanted to like it. I'm sad to be disappointed in a novel by the author of The sea, the sea, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I read numerous positive reviews and the blurb captured my fancy, so I had no doubt I'd enjoy the novel.

It started well. After the first chapter, I thought I was in for a treat. But soon, I was disillusioned. I almost gave up twice but forced myself to the finish line.

The major problem was my inability to understand what Murdoch was trying to convey - her message. She explores religion and morality philosophically, but I couldn't fathom the end goal.

From a simplistic view, it felt like a study of human nature, showing how we vacillate between spirituality and earthly desires. But I suspected there was something deeper I couldn't grasp.

I also had difficulty with the characters. Except for one or two, they were a barricade, preventing me from connecting with the story. They exasperated me.

The only thing I connected with was the setting. Its beauty and mystery held my attention and got me to the end. Murdoch's writing also helped. I liked her symbolism, though I didn't understand all of it.

The story was better than I hoped at the end, but by then, I was too tired to fully appreciate it.

I'm not sure if I'll read more of Iris Murdoch. I feel I've reached an impasse with her for now.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

A classic piece of literature, this book is truly remarkable. It's almost 5 stars, but I believe a re-reading will be necessary to fully appreciate it and give it that perfect 5-star rating.

Iris Murdoch had me hooked from the very beginning. The book commences with these captivating lines: "Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason."

The story is set in 1950's England, yet it feels so relevant that it could have occurred today. "The Bell" is about a group of dysfunctional individuals, which really means they are just like you and me. They live together in a small community near an abbey, each on a personal journey to discover who they truly are. Murdoch creates characters that you can swear you know or identify with. She masterfully captures the genuine emotions and the honest struggles of identity and calling.

Murdoch also raises profound questions about religion, morality, idolatry, and humanity within the relationships of her characters. I gained a great deal more from this book after engaging in discussions and reading some online reviews and commentaries. There is so much depth and substance to this work, far beyond just a good story. Murdoch weaves the characters and the setting together in a brilliant and intricate manner.

However, I did find it a bit challenging to read at times. I'm not sure if it was due to her unique prose or simply the classic style that I had to grow accustomed to. Nevertheless, Murdoch's writing is rich with symbolism, thought-provoking questions, and raw emotion. I eagerly look forward to delving into more of her works in the future.

I added this book to my to-read shelf because of this article.

The article titled "Books to give you hope: The Bell by Iris Murdoch" caught my attention.

It was published on August 11, 2016, on The Guardian's books blog.

The link provided, https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo..., led me to a detailed exploration of the book.

The Bell is said to be a work that offers hope, which is something that many readers seek in literature.

Iris Murdoch's writing is renowned for its depth and complexity, and this book seems to be no exception.

The article likely provided insights into the plot, characters, and themes of the book, piquing my curiosity and making me eager to read it for myself.

Adding it to my to-read shelf ensures that I won't forget about it and can look forward to delving into its pages in the future.

My love for Iris Murdoch runs deep.

When I picked up my first book of hers, I was immediately captivated. So much so that I wanted to throw caution to the wind and forget about reserving money for the month's groceries just to purchase another one of her books.

I haven't read a book in a long time that had such a dense, almost theatrical cast and a complex plot. It was both serious and philosophical, making it a truly engaging read.

I must admit that I am protective of Dora. I believe Iris also favored her as she has the last word in the novel. The story ends with her, which gives her character a certain significance.

If this novel were to be turned into a play, I would definitely audition for the role of Dora. She is the most fun and a main character, and I think I could bring her to life on stage.

I also liked Michael a lot, until almost the end when he was an asshole about his thoughts on Dora. When he agreed with James that she was a "bitch," I felt a big "fuck you" towards him. It just didn't make sense, and I'm not sure exactly what they both meant.

He really shouldn't be so judgmental. I would have forgiven him for falling in love with people much younger, but at that moment, I took back my sympathy.

Why do I keep discovering favorite authors? I'm so interested in getting her philosophy books as well, but I think I need to read many more of her novels first.

I guess this was the 4th book she wrote. My next one, as you can guess, will be The Sea, the Sea. And after that, who knows? I'm excited to see where this journey with Iris Murdoch takes me.